Abstract: This study, based on quantitative analysis of several bibliometric datasets, examines the position of East European Jewish studies. It is argued here that the number of studies on East European Jewry, as exemplified by the datasets analyzed here, is not proportional to its demographic, sociopolitical, or cultural position in history. The proportion seems rather to replicate the mental maps of “centrality” and “marginality” in the contemporary world, with Israel as an important exception. It is further suggested that power relations between centers and peripheries of academic Jewish studies go along the lines of the more general mechanisms of systemic inequity in academia, for which geography and social diversity, together with gender, are the primary and best recognized factors of underrepresentation. The underrepresentation of Eastern Europe is even more transparent when viewed through the map of the geographical origin of the scholarship. Most high-profile scholarship is produced in North America and Israel, while the number of contributions coming from Eastern Europe is negligible. This is surprising when confronted with the apparent boom of Jewish studies in several countries of the region. The sample material analyzed here suggests the existence of self-limiting East European practices which create alternative local circulations for publications produced and distributed there that never merge into a wider international exchange of knowledge.
Abstract: This essay explores two “real imaginary” worlds in Europe -- the “virtually Jewish” and the “imaginary wild west.” The author describes some of the ways that European non-Jews adopt, enact and transform elements of Jewish culture, using Jewish culture at times to create, mold, or find, their own identities. She also describes a surprising and remarkably multi-faceted Far West subculture in Europe that, stoked, marketed and even created by popular culture, forms a connected collection of “Wild Western spaces.” There are major differences between the “virtually Jewish” phenomenon and the “virtually western” European response to the American Frontier saga. One has to do with a real, traumatic issue: coming to terms with the Holocaust and its legacy of guilt and loss. The other is the embrace and elaboration of a collective fantasy and its translation into personal experience. But in certain ways they can be viewed as analogous phenomena. Both have to do with identity, and the ways in which people use other cultures to shape their own identities. In addition, in both “virtually Jewish” and “imaginary western” realms, the issue of “authenticity” is involved, as well as the distinction between creative cultural appropriation and mere imitation. Both entail the creation of “new authenticities” -- things, places and experiences that in themselves are real, with all the trappings of reality, but that are quite different from the “realities” on which they are modeled or that they are attempting to evoke. The process has led to the formation of models, stereotypes, modes of behavior and even traditions.
